Other UBC Event
IRES Student Seminar with Victor Cardenas and Ted Scott
December 5, 2024, 12:30 pm to 1:20 pm
Estimating climate change impact in financing to vulnerable smallholder farmers via microfinance financial resiliency
Climate change may exacerbate the finance challenges faced by smallholder farmers (SHFs) due to increased capital costs affecting agricultural operations. Microfinance institutions (MFIs), as financial providers, may restrict their lending capacity to smallholder farmers (SHFs) affected by disasters, which might halt output or increase economic costs. The research on the effects of climate change on MFI lending capacity and SHF financing is still in its early stages. Since the establishment of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) by developed economies in 2016, climate change and financial institutions have garnered scholarly interest; yet, research on microfinance institutions for smallholder farmer research remains unexamined. My study investigates worldwide trends in physical risk assessments for microfinance institutions to smallholder farmers. I evaluate catastrophic tropical storms and floods that impact MFI lending ability. I analyze the effects of climate change on 4,500 microfinance institutions (MFIs) based on climatic scenarios (RCP).
Victor Cardenas, IRES PhD student
Victor is a 3rd-year PhD student at IRES, Climate and Costal Ecosystems Lab member, and Large Language Model Climate Solution Scholar. He has 22 years of public and private practice in disaster risk and climate risk financing and experience in the field in 30 developing economies. He advises multilateral financial organizations and UN agencies; he is member of the UNFCCC expert group for the Warsaw mechanism for Loss and Damages. He has a B.A. in Economics from ITAM in Mexico and a master’s in finance from IE Business School in Spain. He is passionate in extreme risk modeling using data science and AI.
What is happening to summer? A global and multi-scale analysis of the changing summer season length under global warming
Summer is changing dramatically in our lifetimes. The increasing frequency and severity of extreme events under global warming has been connected to changes in the timing of summer onset, duration, and withdrawal, which impact phenology, economic cycles, and energy demand. My work updates and expands prior studies of summer timing and duration by separately considering midlatitude land, ocean, and coastal margins, where many of the global population resides. I find that each of those areas has seen a substantial increase in summer length since 1990, and compared with previous work, the average rate of growth has doubled to nine days per decade when including more recent data. While changes to summer are not uniformly distributed, in most areas the onset of summer is rapidly moving earlier. If the length of summer continues increasing even under an apparent linear warming rate, associated impacts can increase non-linearly, exceeding thresholds for human health, ecosystems, and infrastructure.
Ted Scott, IRES PhD student
Ted Scott is a 2nd year PhD student in Geography in the Climate and Coastal Ecosystems Lab and the Climate Dynamics Group, co-advised by Simon Donner and Rachel White (EOAS). His current research investigates multi-scale patterns in surface temperature and heat accumulation since the late 20th century. Prior to his study at UBC, he earned a PhD in Geophysics at the University of Minnesota, has worked as a data scientist at Microsoft, and more recently taught high school math and science.